Featured Machine Learning Takes On The Brain AI Essay Graders Seek High Marks for Speed and Accuracy

Even so, for decades now, researchers have known ways to automatically evaluate student writing. What’s been lacking, explains Tom Landauer, executive vice president at the Knowledge Technologies group of Pearson, is the computer processing power to make grading practical. Processing power has now become a nonissue, of course. At the same time, Landauer says, “The algorithms used to analyze student writing have gotten more complex.” A one-time faculty member at Harvard, Dartmouth, Stanford, Princeton, and most recently the University of Colorado, Landauer’s name appears on five patents associated with latent semantic analysis (http://lsa. colorado.edu), a statistical technique used in natural language processing. LSA is just one of many techniques that researchers are employing to advance the state of automated essay grading.